How Machines Can Defeat People

By Patricia Blake

The lights dimmed in the university auditorium, the students' chatter subsided, and the professor from California, Psychologist Donald A. Norman, began his lecture. The topic: how people interact with things. The student in charge of showing Norman's slides pushed the control button, and crash! The tray shot out of the projector, fell onto the floor and disgorged all the slides. For 15 minutes Norman struggled to put them back in order. When he resumed his talk and the student began pressing the control button again, the slides refused to move the right way. The harder the student pressed to ensure that the switch was making contact, the worse the mix-up became. Later a technician explained that a brief push of the button prompted a slide to the front, while a long one caused it to reverse. Norman's rueful comment: "What an elegant design. Why, it managed to do two functions with only one button. But how was a first-time user of the projector to know this?"

It was far from Norman's first encounter with an elegant design that nevertheless flummoxes the user. In fact, as he argues in a provocative new book, The Psychology of Everyday Things (Basic Books; $19.95), such devices are actually not well designed at all. The industrial designers who shaped them, says Norman, are guilty of ignoring basic patterns in people's expectations. As a result, the machines abet a perverse law of nature formulated by Columnist Russell Baker: "The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him."

Norman, 52, speaks with professional as well as personal authority in this area. His first degree, from M.I.T., was in electrical engineering, and he is a noted authority on cognitive psychology, the study of mental activity that involves perceiving, thinking and doing. Yet, as he describes it in his book, he has been fighting a losing battle for years with objects in his office, home and car. He switches on the wrong lights, pushes on doors meant to be pulled, and stands dumb before the mysteries of digital watches and VCRs. "How come I can work a multimillion-dollar computer installation, but not my home refrigerator?" he asks. The answer, he says, is nearly always bad design.

Well-designed objects, asserts Norman, should have what he calls visibility: they should contain visual clues to their operation. "When simple things need pictures, labels, or instructions, the design has failed," he says. A key to visibility is "natural mapping" that relies on the mind's ability to grasp and remember appropriate actions by physical analogy. Permanently mapped in the mind, for example, is the fact that turning a wheel to the right will steer a tricycle, later a sports car, in the same direction.

Designers delight in cockamamy mappings, charges Norman. They devise one handsome single control that can order a series of contrary functions, as in the case of the slide projector. Or they line up row upon row of switches that are aesthetically pleasing but give no hint as to which switch does what. Controls for the four burners on an ordinary stove, Norman points out, should always be in a square pattern corresponding to the placement of the burners, not in a confusing straight line. In his university laboratory, Norman has rearranged the light switches on a control plate so that they mirror the positions of the lights being controlled.

"Proper design," he says, "can make a difference in our quality of life." If designers will not "help fight the battle for usability," then, he urges, frustrated consumers should write to manufacturers, complain to stores and buy well-designed products even if they do cost a bit more. "And enjoy yourself. Walk around the world examining the details of design," he says. "Give mental prizes to those who practice good design: send flowers. Jeer those who don't: send weeds."